AppsScriptPulse

Smart replacing images in Google Slides with Gemini Pro API and Vertex AI

Image credit: Ivan Kutil

Surely, you have also experienced having a presentation in which you needed to replace old content with new. Replacing text is very simple because you just need to use the Replace function, and you can either do it in the Google Slides user interface.

The problem arises when you need to replace one image with another, for example, if your corporate logo is updated to a new graphic design or if one of your favorite cloud services updates its icons (Gmail, blink blink ;-) It’s still somewhat bearable with one presentation, but what do you do when, like me, you have thousands of Google Slides files on your Google Drive?

This post explores a clever application of the Gemini API’s multimodal capabilities, created by Ivan Kutil. His code utilizes GenAI to automatically detect outdated logos within your Google Slides presentations. The original blog post (March 2024) used the Gemini Pro Vision API. As a sign of how rapidly this area evolves, Google now recommends switching to Gemini 1.5 Flash or Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Switching to the newer APIs is very straightforward as all you need to do is search the source code for models/gemini-pro-vision and replace with models/gemini-1.5-flash or models/gemini-1.5-pro.

For Apps Script projects I lean towards Gemini 1.5 Flash as it is designed for speed. I’m also always looking to opportunities to test the GeminiApp library for Apps Script and very quickly I was able to fork Ivan’s code and use Gemini 1.5 Flash using a service account.

While GeminiApp requires some initial setup, it offers significant advantages:

  • Easy Model Testing: Experiment with various models quickly.
  • Built-in Features: Includes functionalities like exponential backoff.

If you would like to explore here is a sample slide deck you can copy which has the container bound forked code (if you don’t want to use a service account here is more information on other setup options).

Source: Smart replacing images in Google Slides with Gemini Pro API and Vertex AI

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